From left; Pat Moccia, Eleanor Suarez, and Renee Testani, all of Orange, attend a weekly bingo game at the Orange Senior Center on Thursday, March 21, 2013. Orange has the largest percentage senior citizen population in the region.
Photo: Brian A. Pounds

The game was Crazy Ls -- a variation of bingo that requires the player to form an "L" shape along the outer edges of the bingo board to win.

"Don't worry about any of the spots on the inside. Just focus on the edges," said Eleanor Suarez, 80, who had generously loaned one of the several boards she had situated in front of her last Thursday to me, a bingo novice, during the weekly round of the game at the Orange Senior Center. "It's easy."

Easy, perhaps, for Suarez, whose eyes darted over about a half-dozen boards on the round table in front of her. But the pace picks up pretty quickly, and it becomes mind-boggling to watch her fingers flick from one board to the next.

But even with her expert scanning skill and laser focus, the game was won by the woman sitting to her right, Pat Moccia. Bingo is, after all, a game of odds, and Moccia, 81, had three rows of five bingo boards in front of her.

Moccia and Suarez, who were accompanied at their table by Renee Testani, 85, were just three of several seniors gathered last Thursday, enjoying a round of the game, where the winner took home a pot of $2. It's a popular event in Orange, which has the highest percentage of citizens over age 85 of all towns and cities in southwestern Connecticut, according to census figures.

With 4.2 percent of Orange's population age 85 or older, the town has a higher concentration of such residents than even the Sarasota, Fla., metropolitan statistical area, where 3.8 percent of residents fit that bill, making it the densest MSA in the nation for that age segment.

Here in Connecticut, a total of 2.4 percent of the state's residents are 85 or older, the second highest density for any state in the nation, following North Dakota, where 2.5 percent of the population are in that age bracket.

"One of the things that drive the state to be so old, is knowing that baby boomers overwhelmingly stay in the same county and home as they lived in during their working lives, because of the social attachment, community investment and deep roots people put down here," said Claudio Gualtieri, associate state director for the AARP Advocacy Group in Connecticut.

"There's little incentive to move, and so since our population in some states in the Northeast had more robust populations early on, before the Sunbelt developed more recently as a hot spot, those populations have stayed basically where they were during their working lives," he said.

According to census data, each of the New England states has a higher percentage of people over age 85 than the national average of 1.7 percent, with Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts all in the Top 10. Here in southwestern Connecticut, more than 75 percent of local towns are above the 1.7 percent national average.

"There's an affinity to where you grew up and raised your children -- what organizations you've been a part of. That's not something people are easily able to jettison aside to relocate and start over," Gualtieri said.

That's what's keeping women such as Suarez, Moccia and Testani in the Nutmeg State.

"My husband just passed away, and my son asked me to move, but I said I don't want to move now. I know the people. I know the town, I know how to get around," Suarez said.

"But why would I want to go anywhere? I want to stay where I know where I am. My daughter went through the whole school system here, from kindergarten through high school; I've lived here for 61 years," she said.

While Suarez said her house, a split-level, is starting to become a bit too much to handle. She plans to buy a lift to help her up the stairs. That way she can age in place, which Orange Senior Center Director David Marsh said is very important for Connecticut residents.

"Bridgeport and Milford have much more age-restricted housing, but, yeah, folks tend to stay here. This is where they grew up, where they have homes and children, and this is where they want to be," Marsh said.

"We try to let them age in place, which is a big term nowadays. It used to be that when you get to a point where you have challenges, they would ship you off to a nursing home. Now there are a lot of home-care agencies that will come in and they'll take care of you," he said.

For example, there are "handymen" who will help seniors change light bulbs or batteries, a "friendly visitor" program in which people visit and provide companionship for homebound seniors and several other services for the town's older population, Marsh said. And in a town such as Orange, which is a bit more affluent than some of its neighboring communities, seniors are more likely to be able to afford to bring someone in to help them cook or clean, or stay with them for part of their day, Marsh said.

Those kinds of amenities are key to helping seniors continue to live in their neighborhood, according to Gualtieri who said it is important to enhance livability for older residents as communities gray.

Communities everywhere will continue to gray in coming years. Between 2000 and 2010, every state in the nation experienced an increase in the number of residents over 85, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And the older population is now becoming the fastest-growing segment of Americans, according to data from the bureau, which found that the number of Americans aged 65 or older grew by 15.1 percent in that 10-year period, much higher than the 9.7 percent population growth recorded across age brackets.

"Towns need to prepare through re-envisioning how their towns are designed so they can accommodate people as they age, no matter what their physical capacity," Gualtieri said. "Residential living should be in close proximity to basic needs like grocery stores, shops and places to get food and medicine."

Orange has already done that, Testani said as she prepared her bingo boards.

"It's very convenient. There's good shopping. It's a good place to be as far as people, and Costco is right here, plus there's a good social environment," she said. "Why would I want to live anywhere else?"